


Almost Home

by Anonymous



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Domestic Avengers, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Found Family, Homecoming, Nesting, Shippy Gen, decompression, these kids probably have some ptsd going on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 01:44:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2330627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint saved Natasha's life about two years ago; he wasn't expecting her to follow him home <em>now</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Almost Home

Finding the misplaced nuclear warhead was the easy part. They had a limited number of potential customers, which narrowed the field of potential thieves, and from there the list of potential meeting sites.

Natasha didn't even have to call in any favors: she was perfectly capable of getting them into Azerbaijan based on nothing other than her own memory of closed roads and shortcuts, to a town with a population under 1,000, and from there, insinuating herself into the exchange. He got to supply the muscle, this time around, and adult supervision in case she turned.

Nobody actually thought she would, anymore, otherwise they wouldn't have given her lead on an op that could result in global nuclear conflict.

Clint knocked out the woman she was replacing and left her tied up and locked inside her closet with apologies and a bottle of water. They only needed a few hours. He took up his place on a rooftop fifty yards away, settled his comm into his ear-canal, and said, "You ready to go?"

"This is kid stuff," Natasha replied, repeating his own words back at him.

Last time around it had been Victor von Doom's murderous AI. Kid stuff.

Time before, infiltration and neutralization of a suspected of a terrorist cell in Pennsylvania. Kid stuff.

International arms dealers, drug cartels, and the counterfeiting ring that had plunked down in the middle of Siberia, feeding fake twenty dollar bills into the international economy?

Kid stuff.

Getting back to actual life on the other side was always, always harder.

They didn't chatter over the comms, most of the time: occasionally conversation would trail on after they split up, but not this one. Not the serious ones.

Clint attached a tranquilizer dart head to his shaft, nocked, drew, and waited.

It took an hour and a half before the meeting went to hell; after that it was six shots on his end and a set of bloodied knuckles on Natasha's, and one warhead handed off to their backup to do with what they would. Both of them signed off on the chain of custody forms and took advantage of SHIELD transit out into Georgia, where they swapped out for a commercial flight home.

He crashed, and hard, on the flight, while Natasha slept in fits, her turn to rough out the debrief paperwork on their way back. Her op, her problem.

Clint didn't even try to push back the stupid grin that thought left on his face.

"What?" Natasha asked.

"So, my girlfriend won't return my calls," he said, and was rewarded with a look of _you are lying and I am too exhausted to deal with you right now. Hope you have fun when I murder you in your sleep._

She said, instead, "A sign that she's no longer interested in seeing you."

"I think I stood her up one too many times."

"Does she still think you're a—" she paused, clearly dragging up a piece of information previously deemed too unimportant to keep in the topmost layers of her brain. "— financial planning project manager?"

"Yep. "

"You're probably better off."

It was a stupid cover, probably one of the worst he'd come up with, and the relationship was very probably not worth the paperwork. Still. He'd probably send flowers and an apology card and drop it at that, let her push if she wanted to push, and ignore the fire and explosions that decorated his personal as well as professional life.

He woke up as they came in for landing at Reagan, grabbed all of their gear because his mother raised him polite, and let Nat hail the cab because she was prettier and had a better success record, securing transport on the first try. Debrief proceeded with blessed, blessed swiftness. After that the longest, hottest shower in the history of mankind, clean civvies, and the prospect of sleeping in an actual bed until his body paid down this round of sleep debt.

That he didn't jump out of his skin when he found Natasha waiting for him just down the hallway from the locker rooms meant a lot. For one, that re-categorization from, _oh Christ threat_ to _oh thank Christ backup_.

She had a messenger bag over one shoulder, and she'd changed into a sun dress and cardigan in clear defiance of the weather, not quite at the cusp of spring, but close enough. The snow was gone, but not the cold from the air. _Knives, then, probably in a sheath around her thigh, and some kind of small arm in an ankle holster. Otherwise, why wear boots?_

"Show of hands, who's not leaving their apartment for the next forty-eight hours?" Clint asked. He punctuated by lifting his hand into the air and smiling with his entire face.

"Care if I join you? It's a little Spartan around here."

"Tell me your feelings about American football."

The world's most comfortable couch and the Superbowl on his DVR awaited him, untouched in two months worth of crazy, touching the ground just long enough to set off flying again. He _thought_ he'd cleared out his refrigerator back in January, but that memory felt spindly and badly-formed.

"I've worked through more unpleasant background noise."

"Good enough for me."

They took the Metro out to his place, and once they're above-ground and walking, Clint steered them into his grocery store. The place with the macaroni and cheese that's more cheese than macaroni and a handful of staples. Bottle of shampoo, because he couldn't remember he had any, avocados, pico de gallo and the rest of the raw materials he needed to make fajitas. It was one of three things he could cook, the other two being steak and baked potato. Not that he expected they'd be in town long enough to go through both meals, but that was clearly what he had a freezer for.

He lived on the top floor of a four-story walk-up, and didn't bother apologizing because the building was completely surveillance-free, to the point where he'd required special permission to move here. With the alternatives being the HQ dorms, the apartment complex attached to the Buffalo facility, and one of the Virginia safe houses, he'd long since decided that having his own space unattached to work, to SHIELD, to the ongoing keel of the world's political processes was completely worth the extra pain in the ass.

"It's not a bad building," he said. "There used to be a death metal band downstairs, but they either broke up or moved out. Are you here for the weekend, or..."

They turned up the stairwell on the fourth floor.

They could pretend, really, truly half-believe that he was hosting a friend from out of town. If they squinted at it just the right way.

Clint did not actually remember whether he had cleared out his fridge before Istanbul, which for its part did not feel like it reared up and _happened_ two months ago.

"I don't have to stay," Natasha replied.

He opened the door for them, two deadbolts and a knob-lock, here when he'd moved in. The building across the alley was accessible from his bathroom window, which for its part was large enough to fit through and leap from, if he needed. Otherwise it was a straight shot down to open concrete, that here he would make one and only one concession to the job.

Both his brows went up; Natasha's expression, turned back on her.

"Did you bring clothes?"

"Maybe."

"You have slept on less comfortable couches than mine. There's a box of menus on the coffee table, if you don't want brave my cooking."

Natasha did not bee-line for the couch, but made a round through the three and a half rooms of the apartment: stuck her head in his bedroom and left Clint with the creep-up-the-back-of-his-neck feeling that she could re-create it down to the wrinkles in his comforter.

Found the leap-across-the-alley exit from the bathroom, the fire escape outside the living room window, and probably knew that the reason he had a wardrobe was not because the place came with two square feet of closet space, but because of the removable panel in the second drawer filled with cash and spare documents in case he ever had a reason to bolt.

He wasn't always this paranoid.

Couldn't quite remember when it had gone away, but he remembered a time when he'd thought that he would graduate high school, work his way up through the Deere factory like his dad had, retire at sixty-five and enjoy a paid-in-full house and his grandkids. Clint could, in theory, buy a house at this point in his life; it wasn't like SHIELD gave him time or space to _spend_ his stipend. The possibility that said hypothetical house would explode or be laid waste by evil nanites or something else equally horrible and destructive lingered.

A quarter of an elderly pizza lay slowly desiccating in his fridge. Clint pulled a face and trashed it, because, well. It was the kind of scrap you _could_ feed to the hogs, although doing so would be _mean_.

Also, he had no hogs.

Natasha had curled up on the couch, which he'd gotten inside through creative use of winch, pulley, and the gift of a twelve-pack of beer to his downstairs neighbors. Not the ones from the band. It threatened to swallow her whole.

Clint started slicing up chicken, and the TV came to life and channels started changing. It was almost like being home.


End file.
